Discrimination between Cancer Cells and DNA-Damaged Cells: Pre-miRNA Region Recognition Based on Hyperbranched Hybrid Chain Reaction Amplification for Simultaneous Sensitive Detection and Imaging of miRNA and Pre-miRNA.

Herein, a novel region recognition of precursor microRNA (Pre-miRNA) based on hyperbranched hybrid chain reaction (HB-HCR) amplification was constructed to effectively eliminate the interference of Pre-miRNA to the mature microRNA (miRNA) by establishing the linear mapping relation between the two fluorescence signals produced by the miRNA sequence in the Pre-miRNA and Pre-miRNA residues to first realize simultaneous sensitive detection of Pre-miRNA and miRNA as well as highly sensitive imaging of intracellular Pre-miRNA and miRNA, which solves one main challenge of in vitro tumor disease diagnostics: inaccurate detection of tumor-induced miRNA changes. Impressively, this strategy easily distinguishes cancer cells from normal cells and DNA-damaged cells by the difference in miRNA and Pre-miRNA expression, which provides an innovative approach for accurate clinical diagnosis of cancer and precise treatment of prognosis.